


the curse of cassandra in reverse

by cosmicpoet



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Simulation AU, postgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 04:52:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15722361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: "Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That's a pretty good idea. I'll give you the moon." - It's A Wonderful Life (1946)It's after the simulation, after everything, when Maki has questions about her past on her mind, and Kaito has nightmares that turn into soft words of reassurance for one another.





	the curse of cassandra in reverse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarEyedPrince](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarEyedPrince/gifts).



Harukawa runs her hands over the scars on her legs, her arms, white-hot lightning across her torso, a cacophony of false memory. She can’t always recall how she got each one; the pain, whilst real, seems to slip away from her conscious mind so that all she remembers is the thrash of agony, without the ache of personality. That’s what Team Danganronpa did to her.

Having learned that she was never an assassin, her whole life façade has cracked. But she still has the scars, all reds and whites fading into pinks that, whilst beautiful against a fading sunset, she thinks look ugly against her pale skin; it’s like she’s been atomised and reborn into the wrong universe, she’s got all the scars of a past she never lived.

But she did live it. She remembers that, sometimes - only ever in flashes and never real enough to be considered more than a nightmare; still, there are twilight hours in which she tries to sleep, only to be woken by the flashing revival of pain - of people in white lab coats marking her body with scars to fit the character she would soon be forced into. Team Danganronpa must have caused her to look like this. Harukawa Maki, the Ultimate Assassin with each scar perfectly marked out on her body to be marketed to an audience for the consumption of people who hiss in pain that it is not their own.

_Am I a character?_ This, she tells herself, is a question she’ll never be able to stop asking. Her therapist has told her to stop trying to separate who she was with who she is, but it’s hard to do that when there’s such a jagged disconnect with her own past, and she inhabits a fleeting body with scars that shouldn’t be her own. There’s only one thing in her life that’s stayed constant - or, as constant as one thing can stay when she was introduced to it in a fake world.

Momota.

She thinks of him now, as he rolls over in his sleep, hair a mess and oversized t-shirt hanging loose around his neck. It’s been a year since Danganronpa, and they’ve both found that they’ve only just begun to start coping less recklessly; she still won’t allow alcohol in the house, and he can’t sit still unless he knows where she is. Perhaps it’s too codependent, but then again, Team Danganronpa wrote a whole storyline based on their relationship. It’s a modern version of love being written in the stars; this time, love was written on a script and pasted onto a sky of fake stars.

But then it became real. And that was perhaps the only good thing to ever happen to Harukawa.

Momota talks in his sleep. She knows this, because for the last three hundred and sixty five days, she’s not been able to sleep without someone by her side, so sharing a bed became commonplace for them both long ago. With the deadweight of his arm hanging over her chest, she’s close enough to him to hear exactly what he’s murmuring; her name, over and over, getting increasingly more frantic until she realises that he’s having a nightmare.

The decision of whether or not to wake him is a simple one. Although having toyed with it in the past, Harukawa knows now that startling him into alertness is a much better choice than letting him experience whatever horrors his mind is conjuring right now; visions of death and blood and the terrifying thoughts that can only belong to a man with a death-timer over his head. In the game, she’d seen him, coughing blood and aching for just _one more day._ Of course, the illness had been faked, and after the simulation, they’d all found out that he was healthy - well, healthier - and suddenly, the world felt like it was trying to pay back a kindness that was long since deserved.

But enough of that, that thinking, getting caught in that spiral again. She gently shakes him until he gasps and opens his eyes.

“H-Harumaki?”

“Nightmare again?”

He nods, moving over in the bed to get closer to her. Sleepily, in the lazy late light of one in a million evenings-becoming-nights, he rests his head on her shoulder and begins to trace his finger across the scars on her chest. It’s something that he does when he’s tired, some form of leftover Danganronpa influence in his mind telling him that heroes have scars, and that naming hers will give them to him and take all the pain away from the one he loves.

_Aquila, Cassiopeia, Perseus, Orion, Lyra._

He makes her feel beautiful. Even when the world is against her, when her mind floods itself with the electricity of real memory becoming false to become real again, he’s there, his soft hands cupping her face and telling her that everything might be terrible, but she doesn’t have to be.

“I love you,” he murmurs, soft, like the nighttime has not yet released control over him. His mind, perhaps numb, is at least calmer, now; he tends towards calm when he is close to Harukawa. The lethargy and liminality of the evening-becoming-night is exactly like the life they live, just sipping in the honey of each day and swatting away the flies, a game of cat and mouse with an opponent that only now haunts their minds.

“I love you,” she says back to him. She loves him, but she’s thinking of her scars, of how Team Danganronpa made her, and it hurts deep in the marrow of her bones to think that he might not love her if he wasn’t programmed to. 

But Team Danganronpa never told him to name her scars. They never told him to stay with her. For them, Momota was a tool, primed to die from the very beginning, so that her tears could be frozen into ice and marketed as merchandise; a heartbreaking series of star-crossed lovers.

And they were wrong. They are not star-crossed, but rather, drinking in the smooth light of nighttime, pulling the moon and all of the stars to earth to claim them as their own.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this! I wrote it for my amazingly talented and kind friend Yuli for their birthday! I hope your day is full of momoharu and happiness :^)


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